Ever since we first saw whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium, we’ve become fans. (One of my daughter’s favorite Christmas presents last year was the stuffed whale shark she got because we donated money to the World Wildlife Fund.) There’s new research today that shows just how amazing whale sharks really are:
“It is like the way a bird dives, then soars, using its momentum and gravity to conserve as much energy as possible. It flies like a bird – but in this case, a bird as large as a bus!” Wilson said. Such behavior has never been observed in a fish before, he said.
I’ve actually got a ton of posts floating through my mind, and I may have time to write up a few of them tonight (including a two-day-late What Kate Is post). However, they’re long; right now, I can give you a link to this wonderful post about how insular the Bay Area is. “What do you mean the rest of the world doesn’t think like we do?”
Sometimes I think the world would be a much better place if half the people from the Bay Area went to live in The South for a year and visa versa.
I’ve read both this post about the Northern Virginia/rest-of-Virginia divide, and been a first-hand-witness to how this whole 49ers-stadium-in-the-South-Bay thing is playing out in the local media (and seriously, Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, all respect, but don’t you have better things to be thinking about? Like Iraq? Immigration reform? The Environment?)
I don’t know, I haven’t witnessed much SF/SJ hostility in person, and having lived in the South I can tell you that yeah, some people look at you funny when you say you live in Georgia, but those are the people you don’t really want to know anyway. Do people really randomly dislike each other that much? Are we just that out of touch with other parts of our country (or state)? Or is this just an us-vs-them thing played up in the media to get more readers?
This is an interesting article that reports on a state ranking by calculating what percentage of its residents’ income is given to charity. Nebraska’s third BEFORE counting the Warren Buffet donation to the Gates Foundation.
Georgia ranks 5th. Given what I saw happen after Hurricane Katrina last year (Atlanta absorbed the second largest number of refugees after Houston), I’m not surprised. It seemed like everyone was collecting food or clothes or money or offering you opportunities to donate your time. One church in our neighborhood was putting up two or three families for a couple of months, and just through the neighborhood organizations, I’d bet they got enough clothes/toiletries to hold five families for that long.
FWIW, here are the other states I’ve lived in:
- California’s 21st
- Wisconsin’s 24th
- Michigan’s 33rd
- Washington’s 35th
It’s the start of a new hockey season today! Tomorrow, both the Atlanta Thrashers and the San Jose Sharks play their respective first games. We’ve somehow managed to not buy tickets to any Sharks games yet; I’m not sure how that’s happened.
In other news, my husband was looking over the Thrashers roster yesterday, and they’ve apparently replaced their entire offensive line (except for Kovalchuk and Hossa). It could just be us, but we were under the distinct impression that the Thrashers main problem wasn’t getting goals last season (it wasn’t; they scored plenty), it was stopping other people from getting goals (it was; their opponents scored just as many). Now, I know they’ve got Kari Lehtonen in goal, and he’s the next Brodeur if you listen to the team tell it. But don’t you want a good defense to help out the goalie?
But what do we know? We’re just the (now not-even-local) fans from the cheap seats.
Zoo Atlanta’s on a baby kick this year. They had three or four baby gorillas born in the spring, and a baby panda was born today! Twins happen in around 50% of panda births, so there might be a second one in the next day or so.
I copied a picture from the Zoo’s website here, for those of you (like me) who had no clue what a baby panda looks like.
Georgia has these special license plates to help support their DNR. I just saw one on a Hummer.
Out of guilt? Out of some misplaced sense that by giving an extra $10 to the DNR every year they’re going to make up for the gas and pollutants? I just don’t know what to say.
This morning, my daughter decided that her shirt was pretty. She thought my shirt was pretty. When I brushed the hair out of her eyes so she could see, that made her pretty.
My heart broke.
To understand why, you need to know a few things. First, studies have shown that little boys are told they’re smart, and little girls are told they’re pretty. Second, this. Third, we’re starting to hit the age where gender stereotypes rear their big ugly heads and I want them to go away. I don’t want Disney Princess crap to invade her room.* I don’t want her to wear clothes she can’t go to the playground in. I don’t want her to have toys that send the message that housework is what she should do as an adult (although at least they changed the color from that ridiculous pink). I don’t want her to be like my husband’s colleagues’ daughter who’s three AND WEARS NAIL POLISH.**
I want her to know that she’s a good problem solver (which she totally is, and when she doesn’t get her way, even while she’s throwing her tantrum, she’s figuring out how to get what she wants despite me and my husband — and then I can’t help but be proud of her). I want her to know that she’s smart. I want her to know that pretty is a good thing, but not the most important thing.
Luckily, she largely chooses Dora the Explorer stuff over the Disney Princess stuff. Luckily, I’m probably being paranoid about this and it’s not as big a deal as I worry about it being.
* Argue all you want, but you can’t tell me that helps eliminate the perception that girls should look pretty first and be capable people second.
** Apparently, it was a compromise on their part. She gets to wear nail polish on her toes but not her fingers or any makeup like her friends at daycare do. (Which, just, GAH.)
Zoo Atlanta’s hosting a Think Green Day on Saturday, complete with a place to recycle all your old electronics.
Sadly, we’re tied up with something else… Big changes are afoot!
I’ll be the first to admit that the Georgia Aquarium’s pretty cool. We like going there, my daughter likes the whale sharks and the touch screen computers near the big tropical fish display. But yesterday there were just TOO MANY PEOPLE. You couldn’t get near the fish, the people looking at the whale shark display wouldn’t sit down so everyone could see the thing (which is required, and the good staff people kept telling them to), there were lots of parents with strollers who just couldn’t figure out that they were blocking the way (and hi, people who run the aquarium, if you’re getting that many visitors, you might want to make people check them), and, oh yeah, the designers had no concept of flow. Seriously, you funnel all the visitors through one small hallway at the front AND make that a place where group pictures get taken? Are you INSANE? Not to mention all the pools where the kids can touch starfish and sting rays are right at the front of the various wings so there are huge crowds right there and no one can get through.
After about an hour, I wanted to leave. Or at least go find a quiet corner and hide.
Since we were out of town for a few days a couple of weeks ago, we had the mail stopped. When we only got sporadic mail last week, we weren’t too worried. Our mail has a habit of being a little flaky*, but everything shows up in the end.
But when we didn’t get everything by Monday the 27th? We were a little more worried. I called the post office and they said that the end date for the stop was actually that very same day, so I didn’t complain. I screwed up and told them the wrong end date, so it made sense that we got little mail last week. They had no good explanation, though, for why we’d gotten ANY mail at all last week.
But we didn’t get our bundle of mail on Monday. Nor did we get it yesterday. So I called again. Again, no explanation, but you could tell that someone was typing “get them their damn mail today!” into the system. Their further advice was to call back AGAIN tomorrow if we didn’t get it today to officially document the problem.
So… I have to complain three times before you’ll take me seriously? Really? For your screw up?
I refuse to care about this too much. I won’t bite anyone’s head off. Instead, I’ll simply move the rest of our bills (the monthly water and gas bills are somewhere in USPS limbo) to online bill pay, and use UPS or FedEx in the future, and contact the DMA to get our names taken off the marketing lists (which I’ve been meaning to do anyway).**
*Since we moved into our house anyway. In Midtown the service was quite good. Here? The mail usually comes at 6:30 or 7pm despite the postal service guarantee of 5:30pm. And my copy of the Economist, which usually comes on Saturday occasionally migrates to Monday or Tuesday. And let’s not forget the times that we get our neighbors’ mail, and they get ours. Actually, that’s probably the explanation for why we got any mail at all last week: mis-delivered stuff finally making it to us.
**I wonder if it costs USPS more to lose my business or for me to tie up their CS representatives with the endless complaints? What if I complained everytime my mail was delivered after 5:30? And every time we got the wrong mail? Hmmm…
A group of Atlanta citizens drove 55 on I-285* — taking their lives into their hands as the average speed on the roads in Atlanta is well over 70, usually around 80-85. Fifty-five is the speed limit on that particular interstate.
I’m annoyed that they were trying to show that the speed limit should be raised, that 55 is just too slow, but I did like the fact that they showed just how insane Atlanta drivers are.
* For those of you who don’t live in Atlanta, I-285 is the interstate that circles the city — which is why it’s called the Perimeter.
Here’s something you may not know about Atlantans: they think traffic laws are just guidelines that only apply to them when it’s convenient.
So to that person driving the red SUV this morning that I almost hit because I WAS GOING THROUGH A GREEN LIGHT WHEN YOU DECIDED THAT YOU COULD RUN A RED LIGHT TO TURN LEFT INTO MY LANE: look up what a law is. Learn it. Realize that it applies to you, too.
You might also want to realize what driving through thunderstorms does to your breaks. Like making it take longer to slow down. Oh, wait, I forgot, I live in the South were all science, including physics, doesn’t matter. God will take care of us all.
Man do I hate people.
Random: Running user tests in the South is extra hard because it’s been jammed into so many people’s brains from birth that you shouldn’t criticize anyone or anything to their face.
I’ve been trying to write something coherent about my jury duty stint for the last couple of days. It hasn’t been working, so I’m going to write something potentially incoherent instead.
Here’s what I learned whilst on jury duty:
- I could never, ever be a lawyer. There’s too much paperwork, too much process, too much competition. And don’t even get me started about having to get up in front of twelve people to convince them that you’re right. I’m too much the sort of person who is like “well, but I can see her point of view…”
- Being able to concentrate is really nice. It was nine hours a day of being in one room, hearing about one thing, with no cell phones, no email, no newspapers, no internet, no nothing. There were quiet pauses. There was nothing to distract you from the issue at hand. It was wonderful to be able to attend to one thing like that. It’s so unlike the real world.
- I really care about making a difference. Look, as one of those twelve people, what you decide is likely going to make a major change in someone else’s life. It’s important that you do it right. Most of the time these days I work on things that I never see the end result to. I don’t know how they effect the company. It turns out that really, really bothers me. I liked that what I decided (and I think it was the right decision) had an effect.
- It’s really hard to get twelve people to come to an agreement.
- It can be difficult to talk to eleven other people when the only thing you have in common is the case in front of you and you’re not allowed to talk about it. (Which you’re not until the end of closing arguments.)
- Having a lot of money means you can dress really, really well.
I think that’s it. I mean, I learned a lot of little facts about various people and companies and situations that I’m not going to say anything about because, well, discretion.
For all you regular readers (… all two of you) , this is a quick note that I’ve been chosen to be A Good Citizen ™, and will be serving on a jury for the remainder of the week. So there will likely be few to no updates.
Note 2: if I were a stay-at-home mom, I could have been exempted. But not working moms. Because they don’t have enough to do in their lives.
Now, off to figure out what one wears when serving on a jury. A skirt with boots? Jeans and a t-shirt? A smart little suit? The court has helpfully provided us with these guidelines: no halter tops or shorts. Right. It’s January for crying out loud. Even in Atlanta, that means something.
According to the latest issue of Men’s Fitness, Seattle is the fittest city in the country. Atlanta? is #23 on the fattest cities list.
Yeah, I’m proud of the move from the lovely Pacific Northwest to the South in all its Southern-cooking-what-do-you-mean-I-have-to-walk mentality. Just ask me.
